"The whirlwind lifts you up to the ceiling, the balconies pass but you don't even see them..."
A remarkably short piece I just finished about the moments leading up to execution.
Something of an experiment in, uh...not being so fucking wordy.
The Consequence of Headlines
6:59
Your last meal tasted like vomit. Like potassium chloride.
You tug at the restraints wrapped around your wrists reflexively; an accidental magician’s assistant. You want desperately to touch your own navel, your own humanity, and you cannot, will not ever set fingertip to that core, that outlet again.
You turn your head towards the glass and look at Susan. Hateful Susan, with her brow all furrowed and ugly.
She was Janice’s sister and you are known as nothing but her killer. Her killer. Janice’s killer. As if she possesses you now that you’ve formally and legally taken her life. The price you pay for murder: you become an article, you are unwittingly defined forever by an act, a moment. In the end it doesn’t matter you have kids, had a job, got second place in your company’s golf tournament and witnessed shuttle launches or didn’t. In the end, tonight, you are a murderer, her murderer, and in the end it doesn’t even matter that you did not do the crime.
Janice had lived like a personals ad. Stable, respectable, reprehensible. A job she could brag about and long walks on the beach. She went to church on holidays and cheated on her husband.
Janice deserved to be murdered even for her mediocrity. You have reconciled this fact, but
Not the fact that you were framed by an engineered accident, by upcoming elections, by circumstance. Susan knows it wasn’t you. They all do, but how convenient for them that you had a motive, no alibi, and souvenir snowflakes of her skin beneath your nails.
Was it something your father had said when you were still in the crib? Stroked your hair and told you that you were a mistake? Is that what led to this life of--
No. Fuck. You did not kill her.
7:00
Two years since you’ve seen Susan and sixteen since you’ve worn a suit.
She looks different.
You feel her eyes on you, remorseless, and wonder if she is avenging her sister or herself. You wonder if none of this would be happening if you’d just fucked Susan instead.
[Does this make her a murderer?]
Your most vivid memory of her is like television; from behind scuffed glass she lifted her shoulder and let the receiver rest there, used both hands to unbutton her blouse. And for one peaceful instant you saw all of your imagined iniquities disappearing into the rim of her jeans on a trail of peach down.
Two years since you’ve seen her, two years since you peered down between the red lace cups of her bra that you imagine she spent hours toiling over in the lingerie store, for your sake. The last impression lingers harder than the first.
You had jerked off in your cell that night. Not thinking of the swell of Susan’s breasts in ruby lace, the fingerprinted skin of her stomach, but of her sister. Of strangling her with ropes of semen, of discharging all over her dead face. She had been battered with a hammer and you never saw her dead but you picture it often and that night you reached desperate, tearful orgasm thinking about sinking your fingers into the spongy, raw, home made dents in her head.
7:01
Maybe you’re lucky to have a time and a date. You’ve known precisely when you’re going to die and so you’ve been able to do all of the things you wanted to do first. Like cook potatoes in an industrial vat, barter with cigarettes, shower with hundreds.
You’ve been in the newspaper. You are infamous. You’ve spent these sixteen years of static becoming a murderer. Why not? It wouldn’t be fair for you to have lost your life without ever really having the pleasure of feeling a girl go limp in your embrace. The truth is, you loved Janice. The truth is, you will strangle that bitch in the afterlife for slashing a big red X through December 7 on your calendar.
There is media, there is clergy. Someone asks for your last words and you’ve thought for sixteen years of what you would say in this moment and so of course you can’t remember and you are back on stage in grade 3 forgetting your one fucking line. Something about Jefferson, something about the declaration of independence or the constitution or Hiroshima. So you murmur ‘we the people,’ and the moment is gone except for in tomorrow’s newspaper and you will never speak again.
7:01:36
You indulge in an instant of hatred for your mother for not being there. [I flew all the way from Detroit for your wedding, isn’t that enough?] You hate your wife for believing you’re a killer. You hate the unassuming, gawky pizza delivery boy for being the last person you spoke to as an irreproachable, free citizen.
7:02
Is it suicide to wait around to let them take your life?
Susan mouths something to you and you can’t make it out so you pretend she’s telling bedtime stories.
7:03
There’s a world beyond the bars but they’ve spent sixteen years weaning you from it. To make this day, December 7, 7:06 pm seem like just any other.
There’s a world beyond the bars, but fuck that world. In ten minutes you will be on another plane and these fucks, these fucks will be filing out into a snow storm and talking about bullshit over cocktails and laying out their clothes for work the next morning and maybe one of them will crush their car against a phone pole and you can ask them how they enjoyed the show.
7:03:30
Small things. You will never again hear your favorite song or flirt with stewardesses or curse at traffic. Big things, you will never hold your grandson or fall in love or be taken by surprise by death.
You stopped believing in god at age twenty-four, but now you feel - just in case - it is imperative - just in case - and you pray like your plane is spiraling groundward. Frantically, you ask god for celestial reservations for one at 7:07. The booth by the window, please.
And you close your eyes and try to relax, but you open them again because that last look wasn’t good enough. You look at the officers flanking you and wonder what their wives have cooked for dinner and if they will have trouble swallowing it. You wonder if they’ll try to fuck and go limp thinking of your normal, normal face - a little too much like their faces - your normal, normal eyes rolling back. You envy them; their couches and televisions and complaints about the weather.
You pity them; their one more day of living.
7:04
You chuckle [forthelasttime] at the fact that the needle is sterile. You press your eyes closed as it sinks into your skin and think about a book you once read with sand castles and harems and gypsy bells and wonder if you focus hard enough if maybe you will end up there.
Susan stares at your pillaged veins and thinks at least now this will be over. She’s made you a murderer so that she doesn’t have to be one. So that she can go home and sob out the last of the trauma, stain her pillow and throw it away.
7:05
You remember her hugging her mother as the courtroom emptied. You remember her glancing at you over a mascara-smudged tissue. You remember that she fucking knew. Now she wears that same awful face, that sodium pentothal twist of smile.
7:05:59
How many are watching the clock and trying to feel you pass?
7:06
They say you fall asleep first, but you can feel your lungs collapsing. You can feel your heart panicking, forced off its natural rhythm. You can see your throat drawing shut.
Then you feel your chest reopen, re-inflate, too much, too big, and it’s black. And there is Janice, sweet and mournful in her fucking oxfords telling you she loves you. And there is your wife, she’s behind you in the mirror as you straighten your tie and the bed is hard and narrow beneath your spine. You open your eyes and you are still in your cell and were your hands always this color?
7:07
The air smells of pork fat which means it is Friday, not Tuesday, not the seventh of December yet. It is 7:07 am and you still have four days/months/years until you are really on that table, and you will spend every fucking one of them wondering whether Susan will come.
You will spend the rest of your death wondering if you’re still alive.
Something of an experiment in, uh...not being so fucking wordy.
The Consequence of Headlines
6:59
Your last meal tasted like vomit. Like potassium chloride.
You tug at the restraints wrapped around your wrists reflexively; an accidental magician’s assistant. You want desperately to touch your own navel, your own humanity, and you cannot, will not ever set fingertip to that core, that outlet again.
You turn your head towards the glass and look at Susan. Hateful Susan, with her brow all furrowed and ugly.
She was Janice’s sister and you are known as nothing but her killer. Her killer. Janice’s killer. As if she possesses you now that you’ve formally and legally taken her life. The price you pay for murder: you become an article, you are unwittingly defined forever by an act, a moment. In the end it doesn’t matter you have kids, had a job, got second place in your company’s golf tournament and witnessed shuttle launches or didn’t. In the end, tonight, you are a murderer, her murderer, and in the end it doesn’t even matter that you did not do the crime.
Janice had lived like a personals ad. Stable, respectable, reprehensible. A job she could brag about and long walks on the beach. She went to church on holidays and cheated on her husband.
Janice deserved to be murdered even for her mediocrity. You have reconciled this fact, but
Not the fact that you were framed by an engineered accident, by upcoming elections, by circumstance. Susan knows it wasn’t you. They all do, but how convenient for them that you had a motive, no alibi, and souvenir snowflakes of her skin beneath your nails.
Was it something your father had said when you were still in the crib? Stroked your hair and told you that you were a mistake? Is that what led to this life of--
No. Fuck. You did not kill her.
7:00
Two years since you’ve seen Susan and sixteen since you’ve worn a suit.
She looks different.
You feel her eyes on you, remorseless, and wonder if she is avenging her sister or herself. You wonder if none of this would be happening if you’d just fucked Susan instead.
[Does this make her a murderer?]
Your most vivid memory of her is like television; from behind scuffed glass she lifted her shoulder and let the receiver rest there, used both hands to unbutton her blouse. And for one peaceful instant you saw all of your imagined iniquities disappearing into the rim of her jeans on a trail of peach down.
Two years since you’ve seen her, two years since you peered down between the red lace cups of her bra that you imagine she spent hours toiling over in the lingerie store, for your sake. The last impression lingers harder than the first.
You had jerked off in your cell that night. Not thinking of the swell of Susan’s breasts in ruby lace, the fingerprinted skin of her stomach, but of her sister. Of strangling her with ropes of semen, of discharging all over her dead face. She had been battered with a hammer and you never saw her dead but you picture it often and that night you reached desperate, tearful orgasm thinking about sinking your fingers into the spongy, raw, home made dents in her head.
7:01
Maybe you’re lucky to have a time and a date. You’ve known precisely when you’re going to die and so you’ve been able to do all of the things you wanted to do first. Like cook potatoes in an industrial vat, barter with cigarettes, shower with hundreds.
You’ve been in the newspaper. You are infamous. You’ve spent these sixteen years of static becoming a murderer. Why not? It wouldn’t be fair for you to have lost your life without ever really having the pleasure of feeling a girl go limp in your embrace. The truth is, you loved Janice. The truth is, you will strangle that bitch in the afterlife for slashing a big red X through December 7 on your calendar.
There is media, there is clergy. Someone asks for your last words and you’ve thought for sixteen years of what you would say in this moment and so of course you can’t remember and you are back on stage in grade 3 forgetting your one fucking line. Something about Jefferson, something about the declaration of independence or the constitution or Hiroshima. So you murmur ‘we the people,’ and the moment is gone except for in tomorrow’s newspaper and you will never speak again.
7:01:36
You indulge in an instant of hatred for your mother for not being there. [I flew all the way from Detroit for your wedding, isn’t that enough?] You hate your wife for believing you’re a killer. You hate the unassuming, gawky pizza delivery boy for being the last person you spoke to as an irreproachable, free citizen.
7:02
Is it suicide to wait around to let them take your life?
Susan mouths something to you and you can’t make it out so you pretend she’s telling bedtime stories.
7:03
There’s a world beyond the bars but they’ve spent sixteen years weaning you from it. To make this day, December 7, 7:06 pm seem like just any other.
There’s a world beyond the bars, but fuck that world. In ten minutes you will be on another plane and these fucks, these fucks will be filing out into a snow storm and talking about bullshit over cocktails and laying out their clothes for work the next morning and maybe one of them will crush their car against a phone pole and you can ask them how they enjoyed the show.
7:03:30
Small things. You will never again hear your favorite song or flirt with stewardesses or curse at traffic. Big things, you will never hold your grandson or fall in love or be taken by surprise by death.
You stopped believing in god at age twenty-four, but now you feel - just in case - it is imperative - just in case - and you pray like your plane is spiraling groundward. Frantically, you ask god for celestial reservations for one at 7:07. The booth by the window, please.
And you close your eyes and try to relax, but you open them again because that last look wasn’t good enough. You look at the officers flanking you and wonder what their wives have cooked for dinner and if they will have trouble swallowing it. You wonder if they’ll try to fuck and go limp thinking of your normal, normal face - a little too much like their faces - your normal, normal eyes rolling back. You envy them; their couches and televisions and complaints about the weather.
You pity them; their one more day of living.
7:04
You chuckle [forthelasttime] at the fact that the needle is sterile. You press your eyes closed as it sinks into your skin and think about a book you once read with sand castles and harems and gypsy bells and wonder if you focus hard enough if maybe you will end up there.
Susan stares at your pillaged veins and thinks at least now this will be over. She’s made you a murderer so that she doesn’t have to be one. So that she can go home and sob out the last of the trauma, stain her pillow and throw it away.
7:05
You remember her hugging her mother as the courtroom emptied. You remember her glancing at you over a mascara-smudged tissue. You remember that she fucking knew. Now she wears that same awful face, that sodium pentothal twist of smile.
7:05:59
How many are watching the clock and trying to feel you pass?
7:06
They say you fall asleep first, but you can feel your lungs collapsing. You can feel your heart panicking, forced off its natural rhythm. You can see your throat drawing shut.
Then you feel your chest reopen, re-inflate, too much, too big, and it’s black. And there is Janice, sweet and mournful in her fucking oxfords telling you she loves you. And there is your wife, she’s behind you in the mirror as you straighten your tie and the bed is hard and narrow beneath your spine. You open your eyes and you are still in your cell and were your hands always this color?
7:07
The air smells of pork fat which means it is Friday, not Tuesday, not the seventh of December yet. It is 7:07 am and you still have four days/months/years until you are really on that table, and you will spend every fucking one of them wondering whether Susan will come.
You will spend the rest of your death wondering if you’re still alive.